look what the cat brought in

originality is dead. listicles are in

the rock i’ve been living under

I’ve been in rural Quebec on a hardware training arc, working at a nuclear fusion company.¹ I live in the same facility that I work in, and am subpar enough at driving that I don’t really leave, so I’ve spent 90% of the past couple of months in this building.

The one time I had friends come by, their response was “uhhhh… is Anson happy here…?” Admittedly, it was pretty tough at first, a combination of being isolated and constantly feeling dumb. Hilariously, imagining myself as an astronaut was helpful — my responsibility was to learn, do science, and stay healthy until the mission is over.

I’ve come to enjoy it. Having to be effective while missing a PhDs worth of knowledge is empowering. More than before, I feel like I can learn anything. Excited to dive deeper into hardware!

it’s list time

I finally (finally) turned 21. Friends celebrated by making me a silly website and a cake printed with Kanye’s face. The following are 20 things I learned as a 20 y/o.

LIFE

1. It’s useful to believe the world is mechanistic

Everything that happens was achieved in steps. Subsequently, you can change, influence, and revert any step. The world is something that has been carved by the hands of people no different than you. This becomes your response to Goliath style problems:

Although I must warn, this is a bit of an info-hazard. If you truly believe that everything is within your control, you also have to grapple with choosing what is worthwhile to work on. But if I have to “pick my hard”, I’d choose this any day.²

2. There is no rehearsal. This is it!!

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that all “life advice” articles must repackage YOLO in some way. I’m just paying my dues here.

This slapped me in the face when my long time friend suddenly died last December. It was a lot. I don’t wish it on anyone, and hope there are better, more transferrable ways to shock someone out of chasing optionality.³

3. Give without expectation. It will come back to you

My natural tendency has always been to give, but I hadn’t been alive long enough to see it boomerang. This year, I started to feel the echoes of past favours.

4. Plant your feet

This is encapsulated in the mega compilation I wrote about enjoying Waterloo.

You have to believe that the best place to be, is where you currently are. At a party, you can either peek through shoulders, trying to shimmy into an existing conversation, or you can plant your feet, get to know the people around you, and trust that they are also awesome and interesting. […]

Magic happens because we choose for it to!

5. You have to learn how to be a woman

It is painful and potentially irresponsible not to recognize the gravity of girlhood. Your actions, refracted by the allure of youth and ingenue, are amplified. If you use attention received as a metric for substance, you will emerge underdeveloped. Paradoxically, you will probably also be underestimated. Instead of harbouring resentment, use this to exceed expectations.

Womanhood, still, is a different beast. It’s having deeply rooted self-respect that makes you protective of others. It’s staying vulnerable while not being angered at the world for expecting that of you. It’s responsibility co-mingled with ambition. Girlhood is realizing that there is a game, and womanhood is deciding what parts you actually want to play.

Regardless, wholeheartedly raise up other women — this camaraderie is one of the great joys. Set clear boundaries with the men in your life, and the ones that remain will be some of the best people you know. Have fun! Enjoy your floor time! Wear short skirts or don’t! The playbook is still being written.⁴

CAREER

6. Please tell me when I’m wrong

The kindest thing someone said to me recently was “I’m not going easy on you”. I never want to be in places where people don’t tell me when I’m being stupid. That kind of self-delusion rots the core. This is also what makes certain friendships feel like family.

7. Find better role models

My old role models weren’t bad, but they only embodied a sliver of life that I wanted to replicate. Surely my aspirations could extend beyond deeply unpleasant geniuses and lonely polymaths. I’ve learned that there are enough flavours of excellence that you can find ones you want to live like. In an endearing turn of events, I feel that many of my role models have changed from people that I read about, to people I know.

8. If you’re serious about doing anything of importance, you need to be ok with bearing great responsibility

A lot of my personal research has been about the minutia of energy security and resilience. Energy is as critical as it gets. Distribution systems are the capillaries of civilization, meaning outages kill. Building something people need means accepting the burden of reliability.

Similarly, the ideas and technology you work on are alive. You can raise them to adulthood, but they may travel, warp, and be misused. If you don’t develop some peace around that, you will never make anything.

9. You cannot run from war

Question of the year for me has been around how to propel innovation outside of the mandate of war. Can you do that with idealized visions of the future? Ego? Those contribute, but I’d have to be blisteringly naive to not accept the role of war in the previous (and next) 100 years of technological progress.

The question then becomes how to make things dual use. For example, reshoring the manufacturing base provides self-sufficiency and can also redefine the climate crisis as an economic opportunity in hard to reach states, etc.⁵

10. Power lended, can be taken away

Any power granted through affiliation with a person or institution is borrowed power. This is not necessarily bad and is often incredibly useful. But operate with the wariness that it is not truly yours.

Like many other borrowed things, this debt also accrues interest. Developing codependence on these affiliations makes your work and life fragile. Focus on building things that last: long-standing relationships, capability, and intuition.

11. Tactile, manual labor is good for you

There was a multi-week period where I would spend 14 hours a day at my laptop. My body was just a vessel to send code/words to us-west-2. I picked up some machining work to counter this and felt better.

12. We have no idea what will work. Just try things

We are generally not exposed to enough context to know what we like or are good at. It is helpful to give yourself a confined time period operate in different situations. Each experience draws another circle on the Venn diagram of identity, crystallizing the center.

13. The engineering curriculum should prioritize teaching confidence, not content

I had not realized how much the engineering curriculum had failed me until I needed to apply it. It is also partially my fault, for treating dynamics and thermo like brain puzzles, rather than a practical instruments for building real systems.

If I were to redesign the curriculum, the first term would have 3+ lab courses. Students would make end-to-end prototypes, with little distinction between what is software, electrical, or mechanical. They’d skim datasheets, debug firmware, and burn up 3D printing credits like no tomorrow.

Students would compete in small teams and grades would be assigned on the basis of milestones, letting them solve the same problem in different ways. This would have been the dream!

14. Working alongside friends can be more fun than working with friends

My friendship “second base” used to be saying that we should work together on something. I’m much more hesitant to do this now, barring a few select people. What is more important to me? That our grandchildren have playdates or we cram to ship this project before our self-imposed deadline?

Also, as my interests niche down, it’s also harder to find overlap to collaborate on without resorting to a lowest common denominator project that everyone is medium excited about. Yay for parallel work and actually hanging out when you spend time together instead!

HEALTH

15. Not taking care of yourself only displaces pain

Suffering, like energy, mass, and swag, is conserved. Even if you don’t personally mind sleeping late, you offload the costs onto people around you, either by not being present or worrying them. At the very least, be healthy for them.

16. Intermittent fasting is actually fantastic

As a snacky person, time boxed eating is great for actually letting my body use its glycogen stores. The binary approach to food also means I don’t have to think about food, but can indulge when I do.

17. Food is medicine

Your gut bacteria is like an all-powerful deity that demands pilgrimage from fermented foods and fiber. It affects mood, skin, and also adapts to crave the foods that you feed it. Eating a ballpark of ~30 different species of fruits, vegetables, seeds, & nuts a week does most of the work.

My favourite life hack is doing this in the form of “flavor bombs” that make meals feel really rounded and dynamic. This include kimchi, pickled vegetables, granolas and sauces or garnishes like nuts, sesame seeds, green onion, dried/fried vegetables.

18. Sunlight on the face, ASAP

Getting sunlight first thing in the morning has been helpful to keep my sleep schedule on track. It’s also a good excuse to start the day with a walk.

19. Read different stuff

Part of the value of reading comes from knowing the material, but a large part actually comes from the thoughts that occur during the process of reading. Reading different stuff, be it old or niche, induces different ideas.

20. Write, write, write

A translation of this header is “think, think, think”. The people you consider eloquent may be otherworldly wordsmiths, but chances are they’ve just thought about it before. There is already a repository of preconceived ideas they remix into a response. You can do this too, and writing is a great tool for it.

Ship updates

It has a busy couple of months!

• Writing

  • Port Paradox, for Kernel Magazine - My first long form piece! On our interview with the director of the port where the BP oil spill happened.

  • Socratica Toolbox - An extremely detailed guide on how to gather well.

  • To Enjoy Waterloo - Another extremely detailed guide on making the most of Waterloo

  • Levers for Progress - Yet another extremely detailed collection of industrial policy levers for science and tech

• Engineering

  • Matchmaking poster - Made a poster and sentence-transformers model to matchmake people based on their interests

  • Dense plasma focus calculations - Translating Professor Sing Lee’s paper into code to easily calculate the optimal dimensions of these plasma machines. This is still in the works.

  • Monte Carlo simulations - Work project. Did neutron transport simulations!

  • High voltage dump system - Also a work project. A physical build

  • PCBs - Designed boards for fun, specifically for a drone and EMP detection device

  • Misc skills - Learning how to weld, solder, wire, machine

• Media

  • Unstuck - Still going! I took a pause to focus on other things, but it’s back in full swing now.

  • Fuse - Edited a 20 min documentary for an internal milestone

  • Interact Magazine - Designed a 50 page yearbook for the S23 retreat

• Orgs

  • Socratica - This social machine flourishing has been one of the great joys of this year. The team threw a huge symposium, we launched publicly, rebranded, and expanded to 15 nodes.

  • Popshift - Helped with a convening bringing together showrunners, producers, and writers from large platforms to meet with climate experts

Gold Mine

• Applied AI is no joke right now. A couple of interesting sets of people moving with speed and craftsmanship: Kino, Globe, Bronco

• I have a playlist of the most emotionally poignant videos I’ve seen. I added three videos recently, by BPS Space, Jeri Ellsworth and Justine Haupt

• Media of game recognizing game: Directors on Directors, 95%-ile, Whiplash

• I am a sucker for anything my friends do, lately reading: Statecraft, Syntax, Brunella-isms, and Molly-isms

Upcoming

• I’m headed back to Waterloo for January. Still on track to graduate on time (shocker). Going to be building hardware prototypes and having fun with Socratica peeps

• Tentatively in SF for next summer. If someone is down to let me use their electronics lab lmk!! Or if anyone knows ppl at Otherlab

1. No matter how cosmopolitan my tendencies become, I keep finding myself in small towns, going monk mode on something. I wonder when I’ll admit that I actually belong exactly where I came from, on some patch of land slightly outside of a major metropolitan area.

2. For good or for bad, it has also become pretty hard for me to consider myself in the context of statistic. Eg. X% of long distance relationships fail. That literally does not matter to me because I have control over the trajectory of mine.

3. We are risk averse creatures that love drawing imaginary rules around ourselves, when in actuality, there is no better preparation for the thing, than doing the thing.

4. This whole section was piecemeal from a voice messages conversation I had with the brilliant Brunella

5. This is a really generous example. This is probably the one on the list that is most uncertain, and I invite conversations about it! I am still developing my thoughts here and am open to chatting.